Best-laid plans

摘要

City planning in America started off so well, with a constitution that specified how cities should be laid out. Then all the predictions of the first fathers went wrong. America they thought, like Marx, would be an agrarian society, in which the smallest possible cities existed solely for exchange. They would be mere tenants at the will of each state, which itself might wither. The growth of cities during the 19th century was unpredicted and unwanted. Courts decided that the right of one man to speculate in land and property overcame the communal rights of men to control their own cities. By the time this was clearly pointed out to Americans by visiting Europeans, the urban damage had already filled bank coffers. City planning had a long way to go to equal the achievements of more authoritarian Europe. America never caught up, and with the growth of Los Angeles and Houston it became dear that not all Americans relished cities like Sitte's. Indeed, combined with their advanced taste in food, dress and TV shows, it could be argued that dumbing-down was invented there.